The Imperial Rescript on Education, a short founding document of modern Japanese nationalism first issued to Japan's schools by the Education Ministry in 1890 and banned from official use in 1948, has been in the news lately. There has been a scandal over Osaka school operator Moritomo Gakuen's questionable dealings with government officials to get a sweetheart deal on state land for a new school. There were shocking revelations about the anti-Chinese and anti-Korean xenophobia of the operators. But much of the Japanese media and public was also dismayed at televised footage of little children reciting the rescript in the operators' kindergarten.
Yet for conservative nationalists like Defense Minister Tomomi Inada, the reaction to the latter revelation was "what's so bad about the Imperial Rescript anyway?" While liberal newspapers have underlined its affiliations with the pre-1945 emperor-centered State Shintoism, it is also a strikingly Confucian document. Emperor Meiji exhorts his subjects to practice the morality associated with the "five human relations" of the ancient Confucian text the "Mencius": to be filial to parents, affectionate to siblings, true to friends, harmonious as spouses and so forth. And the Emperor speaks of his subjects "ever united in filial piety and loyalty," two cardinal Confucian virtues.
Conservatives have affirmed these homely moral elements of the rescript, arguing that the "spirit of the rescript" merely aims to make Japan a moral, not a war-mongering nation. Why shouldn't schools have their kids recite it today? To understand why they shouldn't, we need to consider some nationalist ideologies which swept it into a growing vortex of hyper-nationalism and imperialism in the decades after it was promulgated.